Permanent MarkersSample

Our kids need our help—in the form of wise questions—to see the desire beneath their desires, sucking holes in their souls. If we, adults and kids, don’t have a solid identity in who God says we are because of Jesus, trying to develop spiritual life skills will be only an attempt to sate our own hunger.

So let’s ask, Why does my daughter want to join cheerleading? Why does my son need “those shoes”? Why is my kid breathing into a bag when he doesn’t get an A? Why did my girl make fun of the immigrant in her classroom?

The answers are rarely as black-and-white as we think. Usually, we’re motivated by a mix of legit desires (“I want to have fun!”) and illegitimate ones (“My desire to be popular is stronger than my impulse control, so I jumped on a urinal!”). Careful discernment helps us and our kids separate the pixels of what’s black, what’s white, what’s gray: legitimate desires, illegitimate ways of meeting them, and a good mix of both. 

Whether to a seller of purple cloth or a cluster of intellectuals at Mars Hill, Paul both hears the central questions of their hearts and affirms them: Yes, this longing you feel is legitimate. At Mars Hill, that sounds like, “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious” (Acts 17:22). Paul responds then by exposing the ways God says no to the illegitimate ways a particular audience attempts to meet those needs.

Often we seek to fill our bottomless soul holes with what the Bible would label as idols. They wedge themselves between us and God, diverting our worship from him. I think of C.S. Lewis’s famous description of our misapplied cravings: 

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

I want more than mud pies for my kids and myself. My own holes—like my clawing for others’ approval, my insatiable appetite to be significant and to achieve—are behind some of the worst decisions I’ve ever made. They have found me to be both a self-loving coward and a finger-jabbing hypocrite. They’re behind the fights I pick with John, the words I hurl at my children, and the disdain I cherish in my heart. 

Our soul holes determine a lot of our lives. If I can locate and identify the leaking wells that my kids dig, it’s easier to point out these wells’ fissures—the ways they don’t hold water.

“My people have committed two sins. They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” (Jeremiah 2:13).